Job losses, banks on the brink and recession knocking at the door. Sound familiar? For anyone who lived through the global financial crisis in 2008, it's been hard not to experience a sense of deja vu in recent weeks. For homeowners and estate agents, the double-dip headlines raise the spectre of more property price falls. For first-time buyers, they offer a glimmer of hope at finally getting onto the first rung of the housing ladder.

A booming decade in which average house prices more than doubled was stopped in its tracks in 2008 as both buyers and banks reeled from crippled credit markets, the collapse of Lehman Brothers and Britain's slump into the deepest downturn since the second world war.

Then came a steady 2010, but this year prices are falling again. With so many headwinds, the question now being asked is not whether house prices have further to fall, but how fast and how far they will drop. Is the UK headed for a crash, like the one that has devastated whole neighbourhoods in the US? Or will it be a gentle correction?

There is plenty of data to pore over: housing market surveys are thick on the ground and, although they are often conflicting, in recent months the news has been almost unanimously downbeat.

In the past fortnight, Halifax and Nationwide have both reported year-on-year falls in house prices while data from the Land Registry showed sales in June were down an annual 13%, before the eurozone financial crisis had even begun to bite.

Property data company Hometrack fanned fears of more falls ahead as its latest survey of England and Wales showed a drop in new buyers coming to the market. It said prices fell for the 15th month running in September.

For agent Adam Shea, who co-founded the Pickwick Estates chain in south London four years ago, the parallels with the last drop-off are already there.

"When we come back to potential vendors after a valuation, around half the people are deciding to stay put and extend or put in a new kitchen or bathroom," he says. "People are in the mindset of investing in their existing home and that's reminiscent of 2008."

But he says buyers are finding it easier to get mortgages this time around. Pickwick, unlike most economists, predicts a stable year for prices in 2012 and has just opened two new branches – albeit in a London market bouyed by City and overseas money.

Outside London, there is another key factor that will stave off a US-style crash, argues York-based agent Kevin Hollinrake. Demand remains high relative to supply, says the managing director of the 140-strong Hunters chain. "If you look at the news, you would think it's 2008 again but it hasn't scared off any purchasers. Sales remain steady and volumes are on a par with last year," he says.

Economic worries such as job security and eurozone problems are on people's minds, but they still need homes, he says. "We have one office in Middlesbrough and there you have had steel plant closures, but the market is doing OK. If people are not going to buy, they will rent."

Nevertheless, the number of estate agents in Britain has almost halved from 16,000 at the peak of the market in 2007 to less than 9,000 now, says Hometrack's research director Richard Donnell.

That echoes a drop in transactions from an average 1.25m a year in the decade to 2007 to less than 700,000 in 2010. Hometrack is forecasting that prices will have dropped 2% this year and will come down at the same pace again next year.

Donnell says the economic backdrop is scaring off both buyers and sellers. By his calculations, 14m households could afford to move, or would not struggle to get a mortgage – 8m own their home without a mortgage, 6m have a mortgage of less than 50% loan to value. But the cost of moving is prohibitive.

"Mortgage application fees are higher, the cost of new mortgages is often higher, there are the direct costs of moving like stamp duty and people tend to spend money on a new home as well," he says. "Staying put is the obvious thing to do."

That looks unlikely to change any time soon, says Howard Archer, economist at IHS Global Insight. Prices are now down 19.3% from the high in the summer of 2007, using the Halifax measure, and they have further to fall, he says.

"We suspect that squeezed purchasing power, tightening fiscal policy, a weakening labour market and major concerns over the economic outlook will limit potential buyers and weigh down on house prices," he says, adding that those factors and problems in the banking system will outweigh any support from record low interest rates at 0.5%.

However, Halifax itself has reported that mortgage payments for new borrowers are at their most affordable level for nearly 15 years.

But cheaper mortgages are not much use if you cannot raise a deposit or have no income to cover repayments, says Ed Stansfield, chief property economist at Capital Economics. "When you lose your job that takes away pretty much all the benefits of low rates," he says.

The thinktank predicts that after a 3% fall this year, prices will drop 5% in 2012 and 5% again in 2013.

"There's a lot of 'my neighbour's house sold for this in 2008', but they need to reflect today's market," he says. "If a property is not priced competitively it will sit on the market."

To get an idea of where prices are really going, we have to look back much further than recent years or even decades, says Neil Monnery, author of Safe as Houses?, a history of property prices. His research suggests the UK market has further to fall.

"House prices, when viewed over a long period, tend to rise at 1% above inflation. In the UK in the last 15 years they have risen 5% per annum in real terms … At some point, prices in the UK have to revert back to trend. But there are different ways of going there."

He does not see a US or Irish-style crash, however, but – thanks to low interest rates – something more akin to the pattern in Japan where prices have fallen every year for 20 years.

"The market needs to come down and, if it's possible, we can do that in a sensible way, without pain and where prices are at a point where younger people can buy more easily.